Why is ‘Wuthering Heights’ a ‘masterpiece’ so misunderstood?

Heathcliff lives a life filled with torment and sadness that cannot be contained, but he inflicts that suffering on everyone around him and feels no remorse for doing so. By not correcting his mistakes, and letting him die without further punishment, O’Callaghan says, Brontë poses more complex questions to the reader, rather than giving him answers: What is love? Does the marriage system work? What are the limits of violence?

This is part of the novel’s complex legacy. “Popular culture tends to tell us that this is the great romance…when [readers] We encounter them for the first time, those jars, because the book is completely different. “It still has the power to shock, and I think we, like the Victorians, are still grappling with how to define it and what to do with it,” says O’Callaghan.

Another common misconception of the novel is that it is consistently dark, while it is sometimes very funny. Nelly and Zaila, the two maids, are big gossips. Linton Heathcliff is a gloomy, sickly and naughty child, who surprises the reader. And when you can understand what the farmhand Joseph is saying through his thick Yorkshire accent, he is often a witty cynic, and never has anything nice to say. When Catherine falls ill after searching for Heathcliff in the rain, he croaks sarcastically: “Running after boys, as usual?”

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Lockwood’s smugness is also amusing. “It’s like a character from a Jane Austen novel entering Brontë’s world, which to me is funny,” O’Callaghan says. “If you read this book and consider it a bit of a Gothic satire, it’s a completely different book. And I think that’s one of the things, though. People take it seriously, don’t they? They’re completely convinced that these are real characters, not these exaggerated Gothic characters.”